Switched to Jekyll

WordPress is about democratizing publishing; that is to say it’s meant to be easy to use by anyone, whether they have technical knowledge or not. Jekyll, in contrast, is designed to appeal to developers. It allows you to treat your content as source code, employing familiar tools such as text editors and version control systems.

No more logging into wp-admin and clicking around to manage content. I can write blog posts from the comfort of vim. ¹

No more worrying about making database and file backups. Everything is stored in git.

No more worrying about caching and scaling. Serving static files is a walk in the park for even the frailest of web servers.

No more keeping WordPress and plugins up to date.

No more ssh-ing into the server to work on the theme; develop locally using jekyll --auto --serve and deploy with a simple git push. ²

Comments are handled by Disqus. If you’re thinking “I would never entrust my site’s comments to a third party”, just keep in mind that they’re not your comments; they belong to whoever wrote them.

I did have to give up a few things outright: search, tag and date archives, oembeds, random quotes in the footer. They’re nice to have, but not essential.

For the migration, I used the wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter plugin. The design is a modified version of the wp-svbtle theme, ported to Jekyll.

I don’t know if it’s a post-CMS world, but there are definitely more options to choose from.